Many medical devices used in the treatment, diagnosis, or care of patients are adapted to collect, and/or transmit data to a computer. The data can include various details about the medical device and its performance. Clinicians and technicians may need to access some or all of the data collected by the medical device, such as from the medical device directly or from a computer to which the data has been transmitted. The clinician may use some or all of that data to facilitate the treatment, diagnosis, or care of the patient whereas the technician may use some of that data to monitor the status or performance of the device. In many situations, the computer may be a server which amasses the data received from a number of such devices.
In order to deal with the data received from a plurality of medical devices, each medical device is configured to include with the data it sends to the server an identifier which is unique to that medical device. That identifier can then be used by the server or another computer accessing the server to facilitate accessing the data in respect of a particular medical device of interest. In some situations, the data transmitted by a medical device may also have a time-stamp related to the time the data is collected at the medical device. The time-stamp can be used by the server, for example, to chronologically order the data, which can be helpful in situations where communications networks or other factors cause the data to arrive at or be stored out of chronological order by the server.
The clinicians and technicians accessing the data often need to have the data organized around certain events associated with the medical device. Some medical devices may collect and/or transmit certain data related to the status or performance of the medical device during a start-up period associated with the event of turning the medical device on. Some medical devices may collect and/or transmit such data as well as operational data in relation to a selected event, such as in connection with patient monitoring or medication infusion. By way of example, a medical pump may be programmed to begin collecting and/or transmitting certain status data after it is turned on, and to continue to collect and/or transmit status data or the like for so long as the medical pump remains on. Once a new event is selected, such as an infusion regimen, the medical pump will begin to collect and/or transmit other data related to that infusion regimen, such as the details of the selected programming for that infusion regimen, progress of the infusion regimen, and behavior of the medical pump during the infusion regimen.
The data associated with those different events serves different, although sometimes overlapping, purposes from the different perspectives of the clinician and the technician. But to focus in on the desired information, it may be necessary that the data be parsed to find the start and stop times associated with the event so as to locate the data of interest in relation to the event. Such an approach is time consuming, complex, and possibly prone to error.